Crack password to computer

[Jux]

We gave dd a new computer. I set it up this afternoon. She tried to use it this evening but it would seem that somebody (dh perchance) has set a password. He is out.

I have made a password reset disk - flash drive- but obviously had to do it on another computer and it doesn't seem to work on this one as I keep getting an error message saying An error occurred while the wizard was attempting to set the password for this user account.

Help!

Well it would be a bit of a silly security feature to allow you to reset the password of this computer using a disk created on another! It's like saying "I lost my key but I tried another key and it doesn't work!"

There are ways of hacking the password but to be perfectly honest it's probably easier to call your DH up and ask him for it.

You're right of course niceguy; I was having a mental aberration. DH denies having set a password, which means 1) he did and can't remember it or 2) he didn't and someone else did. Bleah.

Quick call to my local pc engineer now I think.

Ok, if you or your H are brave enough, you can download something called Hiren's Boot CD and use the recovery options to reset the password.

To be fair though, if you are not technically minded, it might be a good idea to get your local guy to pop round. Should only be a 10 minute job max.

If it's brand new and therefore you've not got any data on it yet, a factory restore (assuming there's a recovery partition, or it came with an OS restore disk) would be cheaper than paying for an engineer!

Thanks lazydog. Our lovely and wonderful computer expert did it for free yesterday! She's quite amazing and I recommend her highly. She laughed at me; quite a lot. I deserved it

niceguy, I'll bookmark Hiren's, in the hope that I never need it.

I cannot for the life of me think why anyone would have set a password on the machine in the first place and everyone denies doing it. I suspect one of the cats.

Wow - she is nice. :) I do the same job and I will happily talk someone through that sort of simply process on the phone, for free, but if they aren't confident with doing it themselves and still request that I actually do a house visit and basically push the same keys for them, that'll cost 'em (except if they're friends/family, of course!)

Well, we first knew him when he was working for someone doing the same thing but incompetently and expensively. Then he decided to go it alone and we used him all the time as I had a laptop which had never worked properly and really should have been scrapped, but with his very patient help we nursed it through many many Blue Screens of Death involving many long home visits. He never charged properly, IMO, but we certainly helped him start up and keep going for the first few years of his going solo.

Now we have had such a long standing relationship, and she is building a super duper computer for dh, and I suppose she thinks it's worth her while to be nice to us. We're kind of friends, though we don't socialise much - due to various medical conditions, procedures etc. I would have happily let her talk me through it on the phone, but she said itntook moments and just to bring it along.